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Date:      Fri, 15 Sep 2017 11:05:16 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Don Lewis <truckman@FreeBSD.org>
To:        eugen@grosbein.net
Cc:        ml@netfence.it, freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: FireFox memory usage
Message-ID:  <201709151805.v8FI5GDZ049767@gw.catspoiler.org>
In-Reply-To: <59BBCB8C.8060103@grosbein.net>

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On 15 Sep, Eugene Grosbein wrote:
> On 15.09.2017 18:35, Andrea Venturoli wrote:
>> Hello.
>> 
>> I'm on 10.3/amd64 with firefox-esr 52.3.0.
>> 
>> Since a few days my 4GiB desktop is crawling due to swap usage and 
>> looking at top, I see FireFox using almost 7GiB of RAM (SIZE column), 
>> 2.5 of which are "RES".
>> 
>> I don't think this is normal, since I'm not doing anything fancy (i.e. 
>> running webapps or opening tenth of windows/tabs).
>> 
>> I've been using FF for several years and, while I recognize it's 
>> constantly getting slower, more bloated and more resource hungry, I find 
>> it hard to believe such a sudden rise in memory usage might be normal.
>> 
>> One suspect I have is some kind of memory leak, since closing FF and 
>> reopening the same sites I had opened before will drop the RAM usage to 
>> under 1GiB.
>> 
>> I'm lost at what to look at... I don't even know if it's an upstream or 
>> FreeBSD problem.
>> 
>> I start by asking if anyone else is seeing this and/or if anything in 
>> the way it is ported or in its dependencies could be the cause of this.
> 
> It leaks like female animal under Windows, too. This depends heavily on your
> set of addons, though. For example, NoScript addon may provoke Javascript code
> of sites to leak memory constantly retrying to get their garbage.
> In such case, close/reopen a tab may help for some period of time.

Javascript seems to be the culprit in my case.  I do run NoScript, but
I'm pretty sure that I had memory consumption issues before I added the
NoScript addon.  I keep a huge number of tabs open and I've seen Firefox
consume 40+ GB of memory (I've currently got a lot of RAM and swap
available on my desktop).  Firefox memory consumption is what finally
motivated me to do a reinstall to switch from i386 to amd64 several
years ago, and since then was the motivation for a couple of RAM
upgrades.

Very recent versions of Firefox seem to have fixed this problem for me.
I think this was fixed in the version 54 to 55 upgrade.  I probably have
300-400 tabs open right now and Firefox memory consumption seems to have
stabilized at a bit over 6 GB.  It's been running for the last eight
days.




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